Girls need to be realistic, the president of the UK's Girls' Schools Association, Jill Berry, said to The Guardian last week. "A lot of our girls want to have it all. That is perfectly acceptable and anything we can do to prepare them, we will. But we need to make them realistic. At different stages of their lives, they may want different things," she says, adding that "there is an unprecedented pressure on girls and more women are going back to work early after having children now. It can all work fine, until their child is ill."
In a letter to the paper this week, the University of Southampton's Women in Science and Technology group responds that Berry's advice was "thoroughly depressing." They write: "We are successful scientists, researchers and educators. Many of us daily attest to the fact that having children, ill or otherwise, does not wreck a career."